Cosmic Crisis

Immersive Escape Game Experience

Cosmic Crisis, a thrilling interactive escape game where up to eight players band together in a deep-space adventure requiring fast thinking and focused cooperation to save the solar system, has recently launched at The Escape Game’s highly popular Opry Mills location in Nashville. This new game will also open soon at more of the company’s 37 retail locations across the country.  This was our 5th collaboration with The Escape Game and by far the most ambitious to date. From an AI character to a fully interactive Unreal environment, to interfacing with physical controllers and an asteroid shooter game, this project challenged and pushed our team both creatively and technically.

Immersive Escape Game Experience
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AI Character Hermes

A key character in the game is Hermes, an AI sidekick and pilot of the spaceship. Hermes helps players along the way by providing mission-critical analysis and suggestions as calamities ensue. We took The Escape Game’s character design and turned it into a customizable kit that allows TEG to quickly iterate new videos, including custom clues to be used in the clue system developed by our team.

AI Character Hermes
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Asteroid Game

Our team had a blast creating a fully functional asteroid game using the Unreal game engine. Periodically throughout the experience, players are distracted from the physical puzzles by a surprise asteroid shower. They must rush to the space ship’s console, charge the plasma blaster, and then aim and fire the cannon to destroy the incoming debris before it hits the ship and causes damage.

Asteroid Game
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Unreal Game Engine Cinematics

A key requirement for this game was non-linear and real time visuals for the ‘windows’ that looked out from the spaceship and the space station. Our team utilized the Unreal game engine to develop full cinematic animations from the flight out to the space station, the docking sequence, as well as the explosion of the black hole at the climax of the game. The process began with storyboarding out the entire flow of events and then modeling, lighting, and animating all of the elements required to create the visuals.

Unreal Game Engine Cinematics
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Central Tower Puzzle

One of our favorite elements of immersive content is how the physical and digital work together. The central tower puzzle  requires players to destabilize an Antimatter device (central tower) in order to create a bomb to blow up the black hole and save the universe. As players complete puzzles elements in the room the space station screen updates, serving as a progress bar for the team to see what parts of the tower they have effectively destabilized.

Cosmic Controller System & Architecture

All of the displays are controlled by a central web application server. This allows The Escape Game staff to fully control the experience by sending commands to the game clients for real time interaction. Whether players are having difficulty or breezing through, the game master can scale difficulty as well as provide pre-rendered or custom feedback to ensure the best gaming experience possible.

Cosmic Controller System & Architecture
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Credits

Our team is world-class, demonstrating our commitment to bringing our A game to every engagement. Here are a few of our allies that helped craft this project.
Executive Producer
Traylor Woodall
Technical Director
Kevin Harkness
Director of Innovation
Justin Eslinger
Design Director
Daniel Petrino
Producer
Jennifer Bonior
Unreal Developers
Jeff Crouse
Carson Carr
Victor Petrov
Video Editors
Christian Whittemore
Ken Conrad
Front End Developer
Cody Parnell
Senior Director of Product Design / Escape Game
Ben Enos
Game Designer / Sound Designer / Music Composer / Escape Game
Troy Armstrong

OceanXperience

Scraprunners

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